


Where Have All the Flowers Gone?

by laudatenium



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Gen, Irish Steve, Mortality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-23
Updated: 2014-12-23
Packaged: 2018-03-02 22:58:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,662
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2829077
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laudatenium/pseuds/laudatenium
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve reflects on death and loss.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Where Have All the Flowers Gone?

**Author's Note:**

> Titles from “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” by Peter, Paul, and Mary.
> 
> The song kind of reminds me of Steve.
> 
> Just some angst I came up with. Hopefully it's not too heavy. You know what happens, at least.

**Where have all the flowers gone?**

 

 

 

They always visit him on Sundays.

 

His mother says it is respectful, to head to the cemetery after church.  Even when Mrs. Barnes invites them over to Sunday dinner, his mother insists on visiting her husband first.

 

She always looked vulnerable, if he looks back on it.  Delicate.  But she never seemed that way, not when he knew her.  Her yellow hair was brittle in the sunlight, the blue dress she had sewn from flour sacks whooshing around her calves.

 

They kneel, because it shows respect.  The sharp pebbles dig into his boney knees.

 

“ _Dia duit_ , Joe.”  She nudges him.

 

“Hey, Pa.”

 

And then she’s off, telling her dead husband about their week.

 

 

**Where have all the young girls gone?**

 

 

 

He kneels for what seems like hours, staring at the freshly turned Earth.

 

He was sixteen, could barley breathe, and had nowhere to go.

 

Why, with his miserable heath, was she the first to go?

**Where have all the young men gone?**

 

 

 

Bucky leaves him.  Off to be a soldier like every other able-bodied man in America.

 

He wants it so bad he can taste it.

 

Soldiers get glory.  Soldiers get respect.

 

He wants to be one, like his Pa, like Bucky.

 

No matter the cost.

**Where have all the soldiers gone?**

 

 

 

Gabe had a handsaw in his pack that he used for cutting brush out of the way, or limbs off trees to disguise themselves when they worried there might be eyes above them.  It wasn’t built to cut down whole trees, but they managed.  They would need to replace the blade, but that was the last of their worries.

 

Monty had an uncle who was a carpenter, who’d he’d learned a few tricks from, so they deferred to him as they pieced the still-sappy pieces of pine together, hammering in rusty nails they had found in a barn that had been abandoned a couple of years ago.

 

There were shell craters from the Great War in several places around the farm.

 

They dug a hole in the still-icy ground at the top of a hill overlooking the abandoned farm.  They placed a pack of cigarettes, a square of chocolate, and a pair of socks Dum-Dum’s mother had knitted for him that he had yet to try on in the empty pinewood box.  It was sunset by the time they had lowered the box in the ground using stolen ropes.

 

They stood around in a rough oval, looking at each other for what to do next.

 

Morita made the first move, pulling a smuggled bottle of whiskey out of his pack.  He uncorked it with a shaking hand and raised it over his head.

 

“To Sarge.”  He drank.

 

They passed it around and uttered the same before they drank.

 

The bottle reached him last.  He could feel everyone’s eyes on him, but he couldn’t meet them.  It was a strange time of year.  The sun’s last rays were hot on his face, but the air was cold.  Most of the ice and snow had melted, but the grass was still damp, trodden, and brown-looking.

 

“Here’s to you, Buck.”  The whiskey was bitter moving past the lump in his throat. 

 

He poured the rest of the bottle over the empty coffin.

 

 

**Where have all the graveyards gone?**

 

He wonders, briefly, before his crash, if they’ll find his body and send him home to rest next to his mother.

 

 

**Will they ever learn?**

 

They’re in the same graveyard.

 

It’s amazing it still exists, but he supposes that even in seventy years, people’s qualms about the dead haven’t changed.  People with living memories of the people in the ground make sure they stay.  Some of the historical magazines he’s gotten talk about them beginning to unearth soldiers from the Civil War.  In his time, that would have been reprehensible.  They weren’t nameless soldiers; they were fathers and grandfathers, uncles and cousins.  Now anyone from that time is a statistic, an artifact. 

 

He wonders when the line blurs between “respect for the dead” and “for the sake of historical knowledge”.

 

If he lives a normal lifespan now, he’ll be going into the ground as they take his parents out.

 

Bucky’s different, of course.  Sometime during his interim in the ice, they reinterred the empty box he and the Commandoes had first buried in a field in Austria here.  Sometime in the fifties, the tiny old man at the tiny office had said.  It was interesting, to think of that man as old.  He had asked after the man’s age.  Born in 1926.  He was older than a man he thought old by eight years.

 

The Barneses had been better off than his own family, so they had insured their own private family plot.  A dozen granite markers, with curling inscriptions and loving epitaphs.

 

The entire plot is overgrown, dead leaves cluttering the bases of the stones and ivy starting to cover two or three of them.

 

Bucky’s headstone was one of the simpler ones, stark lines resting between his mother’s rose inscriptions and his stillborn brother’s tiny doves. 

 

 

SGT. JAMES BUCHANAN BARNES

109TH INFANTRY &

THE HOWLING COMMANDOS

1917-1945

 

 

He would have hated it.  Would have complained that there was more to him than his service.  There was no heart.

 

No Bucky.  Only James.

 

There’s no one left to care for this place.  Rebecca had moved out to Indiana after she married, the records said, and had been buried there, with her husband.  Rebecca had three children, but Uncle Bucky was probably a cool story to tell their friends, not a crumbling gravestone over an empty pine box the Commandos had sawed and nailed themselves.

 

They’d never found his body.

 

He brushes the leaves away from the base of the stone, and rubbed off as much dirt as he could.

 

He sat on the ground, clutching a coffee can filled with chocolate, cigarettes, sugar cubes, peppermint sticks.  Modern equivalents to the things they had pilfered from the corner store when they were scrawny brats on dares.

 

“Miss you, Buck.  It’s so strange here.”

 

 

 

He couldn’t afford anything more than limestone when he had buried his mother.  He had argued with himself over whether to put what little money he had towards flowers or a headstone.  One of the old Jewish ladies who lived in his building had made the decision for him.

 

“ _Bubbeleh_ , flowers wither and die.  Stone is cold, yes, but we create all of our best monuments from stone.  It will last.  Flowers would honor her now, but stone will honor her for ages.”

 

He had spent his last pennies on a simple limestone marker with her name, years of birth and death, and a cross.  He couldn’t afford more than that.  He had wanted to put something about her maiden name and birth in Ireland, or perhaps “Loving Wife and Mother”, but he had only scraped enough together to make sure the years were on there.

 

She had told him about her youth in the farm outside of Kilkenny, how her at her father’s death when she was eight they had to make do with fieldstone.  He had managed a weekend during the war, where they had suspected Hydra trying to set up a base in neutral Ireland, to go to the nameless village and ask the priest to see the graves of his mother’s family.  The man had been very obliging, pulling out the hand-written records and tracing the plan with a withered finger.  He had lit a lantern and followed the father into the blackened cloudy night.  There was nothing at the site save the jagged remains of rock and some indents that might have once been words.

 

He was happy with his decision of limestone.  It wouldn’t topple after fifty years.

 

It had faded, though.  Acid rain and the urban environment, combined with direct sun and lichen had eaten away at the edges, but the words were still legible:

 

 

SARAH ROGERS

┼

1893 - 1934

 

 

 

The grey had mottled over time, a hairline fracture marring the face and cutting through the second “R” in “Rogers”.  The marker listed slightly left, tilting towards her husband’s.

 

He kneels, because that’s what you’re supposed to do.

 

“Hey Ma, Pa,” he croaks.  He waits for something else to come, but it doesn’t.

 

He brushed his fingers along the top arc, before leaning to kiss it gently.  He stood, slapping dirt off of his slacks.

 

Before he turns to go, he rests the bouquet of yellow roses where her head should be.

 

Yes, they’ll decay.  But so did she.

 

 

 

Before he leaves, he sees his cenotaph.  Stark told him that his father had a fund set up for a grand ceremonial interment in Arlington, but many of the good people of Brooklyn had vehemently been against it.  They claimed that the native son should come home.  So they built two monuments to him.

 

The cenotaph in Arlington is gaudy, something fitting Howard Stark’s money.  A bronze statue of himself in the midst of battle, shouting something, stands at the top of a hill, overlooking thousands of white stone crosses.  He carries his shield in his left hand and the flag in right.  Some rambling speech about freedom and bravery is engraved on the sides of the marble pedestal.

 

The cenotaph in Brooklyn is a simple marble block, surrounded by a low fence.  People leave stuffed animals, flowers, balloons, candles, tiny plastic replicas of his shield, letters in plastic sleeves.  He wonders if he could take the letters, seeing as they were meant for him.

 

 

CAPTAIN STEVEN GRANT ROGERS

“CAPTAIN AMERICA”

BORN IN BROOKLYN, NY, JULY 4, 1918

DIED NORTH OF THE ARTIC CIRCLE, APRIL 22, 1945

 

THIS MONUMENT STANDS TESTAMENT TO THE HONOR AND VALOR DISPLAYED BY THIS EXTRODINARY MAN, UNTIL SUCH TIME AS HE IS BROUGHT HOME

 

 

There is a tiny eternity flame burning in a bronze plate.

 

He wonders when they’ll put it out, now that he’s home.

**Author's Note:**

> "Dia duit" is a common greeting in Irish Gaelic. (Literally "Day of God")


End file.
